Friday, February 20, 2015

Zimbabwe’s president and guests to enjoy a $1m party at a luxury golf course amid widespread child malnutrition and high unemployment

President Robert Mugabe enjoys his 85th birthdaycake in in 2009(Pix: Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)By David Smith

John F Kennedy being serenaded by Marilyn Monroe apart, most presidents tend to make their birthdays private, low-key affairs. Not Robert Mugabe. Year after year the leader of Zimbabwe holds a lavish celebration, regardless of the state of the economy, and his 91st birthday will be no different.

There will be music, dancing and elephant meat on the menu as an estimated 20,000 guests gather on a luxury golf course near Victoria Falls for a jamboree set to cost at least $1m (£650,000). Opposition MPs have branded the feast obscene in a country where the UN says one in three children are stunted because of hunger.

Nigeria appears to be falling again under
the excruciating spell of a star presaged by this remarkable poet of limitless
possibilities. At the time Christopher
Okigbo wrote the poem shortly before his death in 1967 the young republic had
writhed in a series of setbacks dating from the Western Region upheavals.

Okigbo had a keen mind that correctly interpreted
these rocking crises as the shadows of some bigger, more devastating whirlwind
into which we were being drawn. As
he studied the events of his time, he decoded an abiku-like character in them.
The details and nuances which chroniclers ignored or gave little
attention to, he noted and scrutinized to find out why they exerted such
powerful but hardly visible influence.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Whenever Nigerian politicians threaten that blood would flow if they lose in an election, what they always have in mind is not their own blood or that of their children and wives. Even their distant relations and friends do not figure in their calculations.

*Post-election violence: who dies? (pix: salon)

What they have in mind is the blood of grossly impoverished Nigerians (people totally unfamiliar and unrelated to them whose death or impairment would not interfere with their happiness, assuming they even get to hear of it) whom they believe they would always be able to easily brainwash and deceive with dirty naira notes to unleash violence. These sometimes waste their lives in the service of those selfish and ultra-callous politicians who do not even place the slightest hint of worth on the lives of other Nigerians. These politicians have also learnt to deploy two usually highly reliable intoxicants, namely, ethnicity and godless religion, to confuse and blur the reasoning of the people and lure them into the streets to embrace their wasteful deaths.

Or is this
one of those off-the-radar reasons that it pays not to mention to the people?

Now, about
my friend and old sparring partner WS. If you want to know what the Western
powers are up to in Nija, you just watch WS. He has been their boy-in-the-hood
ever since one of his lecturers at IU inspired him to set up his Pyrates as
cover for a Nija network branch of British intelligence. And you think he got
his Nobel for his unreadable books? But that’s another story.

Anyway what
has that deal, signed in May 2010, got to do with Wole’s pro-Buhari position,
or with the momentum of the Buhari campaign despite his being prima facie the
Boko Haram candidate?

The report
about that China
deal concluded on this note:

“Western
policy on Nigeria
is driven by the super-profits generated from the extraction of oil and its
processing. While publicly the US
and its allies proclaim the need for democracy and openness, this is window
dressing. Anything that impedes their drive for profits, whether from local
opposition or from a rival nation, will be dealt with ruthlessly when required.
The latest moves by China
will have caused consternation in the boardrooms of the big oil companies, and
countermeasures are all but inevitable.”

That’s the link, I tell you, to events now unfolding in the
2015 elections.

Is the
pro-Buhari campaign momentum part of the countermeasures? An effort at regime change
by orchestrated propaganda?

To
appreciate that possibility, go watch the film “A Very British Coup” to see how
such is done.

But what was
the deal for? Why did it give offence and cause consternation in the boardrooms
of the western oil giants—Shell, ExxonMobil and the lot?

Friday, February 6, 2015

One day in the very near future,
naysayers of the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency are
going to be confronted with the greatest and indisputable evidence of their error and ignorance: the aircraft in which they
travel to take care of their vast business empire straddling the length and
breadth of Nigeria and sometimes across our shores will be handled by pilots
trained under the Amnesty scheme of the Jonathan Administration! When their
jets and helicopters would have flown safely through the turbulence of the sky
and landed to the applause of both the passengers and loved ones waiting to
receive them at well-lit airports maintained by electricians includingtrainees of the Amnesty school, the critics would be humbled by a
numbing reality: Jonathan isn’t “clueless” after all!

*President Jonathan

But it is not only in that field the
president has confounded his captious compatriots. In education he has become
the first president of Nigeria
to address the vexatious issue of federal
universities being the exclusive preserve of some states. By causing the
establishment of nine of such institutions in the states that had none,
Jonathan has ensured that each state in Nigeria now has at least one
federal university either in existence or under actual construction.

A contribution to the Abuja symposium on “NATIONAL
CONFAB AND THE 2015 GENERAL ELECTIONS” on
MONDAY, 2ND FEBRUARY 2015

VENUE: LAGOS/OSUN
HALL, TRANSCORP HILTON HOTEL

-----------------------------

===========================================

2015 Presidential Election Issues

After that historical backgrounder,
I shall now examine 4 election issues, the two on everybody’s mind —Corruption
and Insecurity, with insecurity in the two forms of Boko Haram and The Fulani
militia, plus two others that are not but should be on everybody’s mind namely,
the 1999 Constitution—hereafter referred to as the Constitution; and Candidate
Buhari. So all in all I shall examine 5
distinct election issues: Corruption; Boko Haram; The Fulani Militia; the 1999
Constitution; Candidate Buhari.

------------------------------------------------

1] On Corruption, I submit that,
under the Constitution, no President of Nigeria can tackle corruption without
inviting impeachment, simply because corruption is encouraged and protected by
the constitution which he is sworn to enforce.

2] On Boko Haram, I submit that it
is partly funded through the structures of the Constitution and can’t be
extinguished without first discarding the Constitution. I also submit that a
military solution to Boko Haram is not possible under the Constitution.

3] On The Fulani Militia, I submit
that it is an ethnic cleansing and land grabbing instrument of the Caliphate
and a mortal danger to all other Nigerians, and that it can’t be curbed under
the Constitution.

4] On the Constitution, I submit
that it is the godfather of corruption, as well as the codification of the
sources of all the vices that plague Nigeria, and that Nigeria cannot be
reformed without discarding it. Though ostensibly democratic, its frauds make
it a fake-democracy constitution.

5] On Candidate Buhari, I submit
that he has neither the will nor the ability to discard the Constitution but
has every reason to perpetuate it. Accordingly he can’t solve any of the
problems whose solution requires discarding the Constitution. So, those who
expect him to change Nigeria by solving these problems are taking themselves
for a ride.

From these submissions I argue that
because these top problems—Corruption, Insecurity in its Boko Haram and Fulani
Militia forms--- can be solved only after scrapping the Constitution; so, the
principal election issue becomes the Constitution itself and how to replace
it. Hence, this election should be
decided by the answer the candidates give to just one question: What’s your program
for replacing the Constitution?

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Three months after
Blaise Compaoré’s departure, Burkina
Faso’s transition is moving forward in an
uncertain context. The provisional government, with the help of its
international partners, should initiate urgent reforms and ensure the October
2015 elections allow for peaceful, democratic change.

*South Sudanese President, Salva KiirSudanese and President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan in Khartoum

The conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan
are increasingly merged. Halting drift toward a Uganda-Sudan proxy war on the
Sudan-South Sudan border
requires better coordination by regional organisations and more engagement by
influential outside powers, notably China
and the U.S.,
including via the UN Security Council. A UN-imposed arms embargo, improved
border monitoring, and a UN panel of experts mandated to study the funding of
South Sudan’s war are needed.

Another issue that the CSC session should take up is the
rebranding of the struggle and turning it into the Nigerian Liberation Movement,
NLM, or better still into the New South
Liberation Movement, NSLM? So, why rebrand? Why NLM or NSLM?

A crucial step in
ending our “mumu” is for us to recognize that the issue for us all in the New
South is liberty or slavery.

One consequence of our “mumu” has been our comparatively
laid back approach to the struggle. Instead of meeting the militancy of Arewa
with our own counter militancy, we have been making gentleman, negotiating
rather than fighting. In December 2013, on the way to the National Conference,
one of the Caliphate militants, Junaid Mohammed, even warned us “‘Supporters of SNC
asking for civil war’”
and that “‘There’ll be
bloodshed, if Jonathan runs’”.
And, like mumu, we failed to take the hint, failed to realize that they were
already in war mode going into the National Conference. And we went to the same
conference in gentlemanly negotiations mode. The other side has been fighting
with the vigilance and courage of desperation, the desperation of a hungry lion
who won’t let his prey escape and deny him his dinner.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Our 'mumu' (is it
stupidity?) has caught up with us. Now, no one can escape the
dire consequences of living in our cultural and institutional deceit,
self-denial and delusions. In
brotherly frankness, please take these from me,

Amos
Akingba.

The quote is the last
paragraph of Amos Akingba’s email of 05jan15 to his aburo. It shall be the text
for my discourse on why the decades-long struggle for a True Federalism
Constitution stands today in danger of being defeated.

------------------------------

From the backroom where ill health has confined me, I’ve
been watching this struggle for a True Federalism Constitution, TFC, and I have
a few observations to share with the elders
and captains of the struggle.

The handwriting on the wall, as I see it, is that the chance
of winning the struggle for TFC by dialogue and negotiation was lost on the
Confab floor during its closing session when Arewa introduced a surprise
amendment to the Confab Report requiring that it be sent to the NASS as proposed
amendments to the 1999 Constitution. By not defeating that amendment, the
non-Caliphate majority of the delegates—from the New South: i.e. south of
Shariyaland, and comprising the zones of South-West, South-South, South-East,
and North-Central as well as the indigenous non-Hafukawa who are trapped in
Shariyaland itself, such as the Zuru in Kebbi State and the Chibok in Borno
State, whose new alliance had secured those far reaching recommendations in the
Confab Report-- threw away all the marvelous gains they had made. In not
defeating that amendment, the New South delegates sent the report to a NASS
where Arewa can kill or gut it. Unless
their fraudulently built-in dominance at the NASS can somehow be overcome,
Arewa will get NASS to nullify the Confab Report and return the struggle for
TFC to square zero where it started decades ago.